Russia appears poised for a clampdown on western involvement in its media with new legislation limiting foreign media ownership gaining momentum in the Duma. Russian lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly backed a bill that would restrict foreign ownership of the country’s media properties to 20 per cent. At present, foreign stakes in radio and television are capped at 50 per cent, but no such restrictions apply to print media.
If adopted into law, the proposed changes would uproot the Russia business of some of the world’s leading media groups and could force a reshuffle of the Russian media industry….
The draft legislation also prevents foreigners from appointing top editors and otherwise exerting control by more formally separating the ownership and publisher roles. “With all these details, this is a piece of legislation that has not been written hastily but with careful consideration to close all potential loopholes,” said the foreign executive.
I’ve never quite understood how having foreigners own your corporations is supposed to be beneficial to anyone but the propagandists. Especially with the credit money system. Write a few bonds, “loan” the borrowed money to a state corporation, then have it buy up a controlling interest in the stock of a publicly traded media corporation belonging to the country you want to control. Congratulations, you now own a propaganda outlet with a mainline connection direct into the communications bloodstream of that country. It’s not exactly rocket science.
It’s rather remarkable how so many of Putin’s actions appear sensible, while so many of Obama’s appear to be so haplessly counterproductive as to be almost sinister.
It’s a bit amusing to see Mike Florio backtracking after repeatedly demanding that the Ravens provide evidence of their claims that the ESPN report was full of errors:
One of the more glaring problems with ESPN’s story regarding the Ravens’ mishandling of the Ray Rice investigation relates to the text messages sent by owner Steve Bisciotti to Rice after the team cut him. In the story, ESPN presents the text messages in italics. While quotes weren’t used, the technique created the clear impression that the text messages were being quoted verbatim. The surrounding context reinforced the idea that exact quotes were being shared…. ESPN has acknowledged that the italicized text messages did not reflect actual quotes.
“We understand the confusion surrounding our use of italics and recognize we could have been more clear,” ESPN said Tuesday in a statement. “Most importantly, the information in our story about the contents of the texts was consistent with what the team released.”
While the contents were consistent, the clear and obvious error in the presentation invites fair questions regarding whether other aspects of the story are incorrect, especially in light of the strong (albeit belated) written response the Ravens provided to 15 different aspects of the report.
This specific flaw also carries with it some irony. At a time when the Ravens fairly have been hammered for failing to ask for the notorious elevator video, ESPN didn’t ask the Ravens to confirm the precise contents of the text messages sent by Bisciotti. Instead, ESPN asked only if Bisciotti sent two text messages to Rice.
The story from ESPN doesn’t disclose that ESPN asked the Ravens only to confirm that Bisciotti sent two text messages and not to confirm the contents of the text messages. But the words selected by the authors invite a perception that the Ravens were informed of the alleged language of the text messages: “Asked about the text messages Friday, the team did not deny Bisciotti had sent them: ‘His text messages to Ray reflect his belief that everyone is capable of redemption and that others, including players, can learn from Ray’s experience.’”
So, ESPN is making up quotes, misrepresented their communications with the Ravens, and claimed that Ray Rice was watching the Ravens-Bengals game from his home with former teammate AQ Shipley even though Shipley was on the field for the Colts at that time, but Florio still thinks that we should take their report seriously? After all, the Ravens response was, in Florio’s opinion, “belated”.
At this point, it’s difficult to rely upon the sports media to get the final score of the games right. Assuming they bother to report it in the first place, given all the socially vital crusades for which they have to find space.
That being said, good on Bill Simmons for being willing to step up and say exactly what he thinks about Roger Goodell. He may be on the opposite side of the fence, but at least he is genuinely calling them as he sees them:
“Goodell, if he didn’t know what was on that tape, he’s a liar. I’m just saying it. He is lying. If you put him up on a lie detector test, that guy would fail. For all these people to pretend they didn’t know is such [expletive] [expletive]. It really is, it’s such [expletive] [expletive]. For him to go into that press conference and pretend otherwise — I was so insulted.”
I think Goodell was lying too. I don’t think the tape justified one additional day of suspension for Ray Rice, but I don’t think there is any doubt that the NFL Commissioner didn’t know what was on it.
I’ve previously pointed out the way that the Wikipedia editors seek to minimize those they dislike and elevate those they support. But their left-wing bias is getting increasingly out of hand, as evidenced by their rationalizations for not permitting criticism of their favorite token black scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson:
Keep in mind, these are actual quotes from Wikipedia editors discussing why it’s okay to airbrush history in order to protect their precious prophet.
1. “Telling a funny anecdote with fudgy details to make a joke/point is not a controversy, its what public speakers do.”
2. “It doesn’t matter if we can demonstrate it happened or not, many things happen in many people lives, we don’t write each of them into every persons biography.”
3. “[W]e may have to leave this up for a few days until S Davis drops his ‘censorship’ campaign.”
4.”So, [Tyson]‘s not making a point about Bush, he’s making a point about the lost opportunity of 1.3 billion people not contributing to the advancement of human knowledge.”
5. “This is thus far a relatively insignificant story pushed by a fringe attack blog[.]“
6. “We shouldn’t be asserting that ‘No evidence exists’ based upon the current sourcing.”
7. “There are literally thousands and thousands of articles about this topic […] If this was something important, then you would see a lot more sources covering.”
8. “[I]t is a non-notable commentary that begun in an obscure media site and was picked up with even more obscure sites/blogs.”
9. “[T]his is being kept off because Wikipedia is deeply conservative in the non-political meaning of the word.”
There are a plethora of examples of this Wikileftia bias. If you look at the page, about me you’ll see that a “Feud with John Scalzi” is apparently my primary View, but you won’t see any corresponding “Feud with Vox Day” on the Scalzi page even though a) he is the one who started it back in 2005, and b) he is the one who keeps talking to various media outlets about it, thereby rendering it notable.
The worst offenders may be the champions of Sam Harris. In the criticism section, they actually offer defenses of the very criticisms made, and the most substantive critiques, such as my complete demolition of his Red State argument, which was so successful that he dropped it entirely, are not there.
Wikipedia isn’t entirely useless. But for any public figure of any political controversy at all, it is entirely misleading.
File 770 sounds a little disappointed to discover that an SF “bestseller” on the NYT Bestsellers List doesn’t necessarily indicate the mainstream adoption of SF:
I’m a science fiction fan, yet I’m constantly being surprised to discover how that shapes my thinking. Although I know bestseller lists are artificial constructs, I also know they are constructs dominated by mainstream fiction and literary biases. Consequently, when a science fiction writer appears on the New York Times bestseller list I don’t ask how, I just shout “Hooray!” But now a Higher Critic has explained why I should be dissatisfied and suspicious about how they got there.
And now I am.
Vox Day unfavorably compared John Scalzi to Larry Correia based on alleged manipulation of the bestseller list. But isn’t Correia’s status as a bestselling author the same reason people believe Correia is the gold standard?
Even here, all Larry Correia ever did was point out two times when his books made the New York Times best seller list. Which they did. But both times the books disappeared from the list the following week. One and done….
I’m perfectly happy that Larry Correia is an NYT bestselling author. (Which I said in the post.) But since Correia and Scalzi both have experienced the same one-and-done pattern, then why would anybody doubt that Scalzi’s listings are also the result of real sales, Vox Day notwithstanding?
Actually, I didn’t compare them. I merely referenced Scalzi’s own comments on the subject. As always, Larry Correia is perfectly capable of speaking for himself. As for me, I answered Mr. Glyer on his own blog as follows: There are two reasons for the difference between Scalzi’s one-week showings and Mr. Correia’s. 1. Correia’s Amazon rankings at the time correlated correctly with his NYT bestseller listing. Scalzi’s Amazon rankings aren’t egregiously off, but they’re not high enough to be credible. 2. Baen Books is not known for attempting to game various awards and bestseller lists. Tor Books, which has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher 27 years in a row, among other things, is.
Does anyone really and truly believe that whereas OLD MAN’S WAR and THE GHOST BRIGADES did not sell well enough to make the NYT Bestseller list, FUZZY NATION did?
All one had to do was look at the Amazon rankings to see that LOCK IN was not selling well enough to have made the bestseller list without a bulk-sale marketing campaign. And as noted on File 770, I had an inkling LOCK IN would not only be on the NYT bestseller list, but be there for a single week before disappearing.
These faux bestsellers aren’t any great secret. It’s just one of the ways the Big Five publishers promote their favored authors. Talk to a top editor or a publishing executive if you don’t believe me; I’m not making this stuff up. Tor is simply trying to massage public perceptions to bump a high mid-list writer into reliable bestseller status.
The New York Times Book Review, which has a history of belatedly recognizing conservative bestsellers, has banished conservative legal author David Limbaugh’s latest, Jesus on Trial, from its upcoming best seller list despite having sales better than 17 other books on the list.
According to publishing sources, Limbaugh’s probe into the accuracy of the Bible sold 9,660 in its first week out, according to Nielsen BookScan. That should have made it No. 4 on the NYT print hardcover sales list.
Instead, Henry Kissinger’s World Order, praised by Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post, is No. 4 despite weekly sales of 6,607….
The September 28 list of the top 20 print hardcover best sellers includes one book that sold just 1,570 copies.
Limbaugh, published by Regnery, has been a New York Times best seller, so the newspaper should have been looking out for his high sales numbers. And as a hint, they could have looked at Amazon, where Limbaugh’s Jesus hit No. 1 recently. On Thursday, it ranked No. 6 in books sold on Amazon.
Note first that Mr. Scalzi’s LOCK IN is presently ranked #3,566 on Amazon and did not make the September 28th list. The #20 book to which the Examiner presumably refers is I AM MALALA which is presently ranked #992 on Amazon. Keep in mind that there are two different lists and that non-fiction usually sells more than fiction.
The New York Times bestseller list is simply not what it claims to be. It’s mostly a marketing device manipulated by media ideologues and marketing departments. Some books make it legitimately. Others don’t. Fortunately, Amazon gives us a means of distinguishing between the two.
Gawker explains the correct way to respond to getting mugged by today’s vibrant youth is not to “have the kid arrested for stealing your phone”:
Now, granted, it’s not entirely Clara Vondrich’s fault that this 13-year-old boy was arrested by police for stealing her phone. But, she did, by her own admission, willingly cause the commotion that led up to police being summoned, and she did—as the photos show—keep the kid pinned to a car until police arrived despite already knowing that he didn’t posses her phone.
Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely fuck up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.
If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.
There is literally no depth to which the Social Justice Warriors of the world will not descend in their interminable efforts to reduce Western civilization to barbarism. When theft is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.
I was a little surprised by what the picture represented, though. When I see a middle-aged white woman posing for a picture with her arms around a thuggish young African, I tend to assume it is a family portrait of a celebrity with her adopted child-substitute. I thought it was Sigourney Weaver.
Having repeatedly tried to support the YES vote for Scottish independence by claiming it was 22 points down in the polls, the UK media tries to boost the NO turnout by suddenly reporting that the YES side is ahead by two points:
Scotland WILL become independent, shock new poll claims as it shows 51% now back Yes campaign with just 11 days until vote
Fifty-one per cent of voters to choose independence on September 18
Shock poll puts Yes campaign in the lead for the first time
Better Together safely holds 49 per cent of the vote
Gap between sides narrows to just two points with less than a fortnight before historic referendum
It’s always interesting to see the way in which the polls move before a big vote of this sort. They always seem to move in the same pattern whenever the media clearly favors one side over another. First a huge lead for the side it is supporting, gradually declining over time, and when the media gets worried it is actually going to lose, a shock poll suddenly appears showing the side it opposes ahead, but only by a little.
It seems to me that the more the English politicians and celebrities huff and puff, the more the Scots appear to favor independence.
Observers are unimpressed with the gaming journalists’ hatred for their nominal audience:
Slate readers are over, declining—a dead demographic.
Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.
Some background: Recently, there were some egregious incidents of harassment in the gaming community, as I covered in a previous piece. The harassment story quickly spiraled into a much larger fight, clumsily dubbed #GamerGate, between an angry, mostly anonymous mass of gamers and the gaming press. The fight blew up on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming sites, 4chan, and elsewhere last week. With rhetorical shrapnel flying everywhere, one ironic low was achieved when popular and resolutely positive gamer Steven Williams, aka Boogie2988, found himself simultaneously maligned as a brainwashed feminist by self-declared men’s rights activists and fat-shamed by self-declared social justice advocates. Another low was when thoughtful freelance gaming writer Jenn Frank decided to leave the field altogether after being unfairly singled out for relentless criticism.
Trying to sort through GamerGate is like sinking into quicksand, but the general tenor of the discussion has been: A fair number of gamers hate the journalists who cover them, and the journalists hate them back.
If you’ll notice, I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to all the new gaming sites and I have absolutely no idea why anyone else ever did. It is entirely obvious that none of them know anything about the history of games, and many of them are observably not very interested in games at all.
Bob @bobby_5150 Between @voxday and @scalzi , who would have thought scalzi would be the bigger douche bag. (;:;)
Agree&Amplify @angreeandamp @bobby_5150 Makes You wonder just what else Vox may be right about.
For some time now, John Scalzi has been offering dubious explanations of his past traffic claims. Last year he stopped reporting his annual traffic and even resorted to posting misleading evidence of a one-day traffic spike driven by an external source in order to shore up his more fraudulent claims. However, it turns out that he was even more grossly fraudulent than we knew when talking himself up to the media. Consider his 2010 interview with this Hugo-winning SF/F magazine, in which he undeniably misrepresented the amount of traffic his site receives by a factor of between 17.5 and five, respectively.
Interview: John Scalzi by Erin Stocks Published September 2010
Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.”
But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.
As it happens, there is considerably more of interest beyond “the dry stats”. For various reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with my relationship with certain hacker groups, I am in possession of a considerable amount of Mr. Scalzi’s historical traffic statistics and to say that he exaggerated his blog traffic does not really do the man justice. Consider: for the 12-month period from September 2009 to August 2010 immediately preceding the September interview with Ms Stocks, Whatever had 4,916,947 pageviews. And while 409,745 pageviews per month isn’t bad, it is considerably less than the “extraordinary amount” of “more than two million page views monthly” that he claimed at the time.
You don’t need to take my word for it either, as in his post entitled 8 Million Views for 2012, Scalzi happened to include a graphic summary of his annual pageviews from previous years, shown here on the right. The 4.49 million number is for 2009 and equates to 374,023 per month. The 5.13 million is for 2010 and amounts to 427,599 per month. Obviously, the 409,745-pageview number for the twelve-month period in between is both credible and substantiated by Scalzi’s own report.
Nor will his usual retreat to the “up to” excuse hold any water. The fact is that at no point, either before or after the Lightspeed interview, did Whatever ever have “more than two million page views monthly”. John Scalzi has only once ever had more than one million page views, barely, in May 2012. And his unique visitor claim is even less accurate. Prior to September 2010, Whatever’s peak MONTHLY unique visitors was just under 135,000, in February 2010. That means that far from being “over 45,000 unique visitors daily”, he was actually seeing “under 4,500 unique visitors daily”. Considerably under, as it happens; the actual number of daily unique visitors from September 2009 through August 2010 was 2,567. Which even the most math-illiterate pinkshirt should be able to grasp is not “over 45,000”.
Now, you may not like me at all. You may not agree with me about much. You may even believe that I am Voxemort, the Supreme Dark Lord, whose name must not be mentioned in the science fiction and fantasy world, in a non-ironic sense. But none of that changes the observable facts. And the facts are that John Scalzi is a proven liar, a fraudulent self-marketer who has regularly inflated his reported traffic in a self-serving manner, and an inherently untrustworthy individual. You simply cannot take anything the man says at face value, much less place any confidence in the narrative he attempts to pass off, because his primary concern is how any given fact or individual can best serve what he perceives to be his interests.
It may help to understand that my perspective has always been iconoclastic and my opinions have been widely read since I was first nationally syndicated back in 1995. As a result, I am under a certain amount of pressure to never modify, spin, or manipulate information in any deceptive or misleading way, because there are literally dozens of critics who dislike me and are waiting to exploit even the smallest slip-up. (Look what resulted from that single tweeted blog link, for example.) It has been that way for nearly twenty years now. So, if I am saying something about my traffic, or especially about someone else’s traffic, you can bet your life on the fact that I am telling you the absolute truth to the extent that it is available to me.
I have had a Sitemeter widget on the sidebar for the entire existence of this blog. I have a Google pageviews widget on the sidebar of the AG blog, and I would have one here if it worked with the old template that I prefer and still use. When I say that this blog had 41,075 pageviews yesterday, or that there were 62,971 pageviews between the two one week ago, or the two blogs will get over 1.5 million pageviews this month, I am not exaggerating in the slightest and I can easily prove the truth of my assertions. John Scalzi has all the same information about his traffic that I do and more. All he has to do to prove me to be a liar is to simply make public his WordPress statistics from September 2009 to August 2010.
Ask yourself why he does not do so. Ask yourself why he will not do so. Ask yourself why he has not only continued to hide his daily traffic numbers since I first called them into question last year, but is now releasing even less information than he did before. And then, like Agree&Amplify, you might consider asking yourself, what else is Vox right about? What else is John Scalzi lying about?
Now, perhaps he is entirely correct and I am “a real bigoted shithole of a human being” and “an undeserving bigot shithole”, my Hugo-nominated novelette is “to put it charitably, not good”, and Larry Correia is “whining about how [he] totally MEANT to fail spectacularly at the Hugos” and trying to “RATIONALIZE [HIS] HUMILIATING DEFEAT”.
Or perhaps he is not, and he is simply lying about these things as he has been observed to lie about other things. The incontrovertible evidence is right there in front of you. To take it into account or to blithely ignore it is up to you. And it’s mysterious, is it not, that this very well-sourced and impartial information concerning his “more than two million page views monthly” is missing from his Wikipedia page.
I saw this conversation come up in my Notifications on Twitter today:
Francis Begbie @BegbieBegbie I think there’s something to @voxday ‘s theory on atheism and social skills: Look at Myers response in the comments.
Preston S. Brooks @Rebel_Bill That’s beyond a lack of social skills, that’s almost into the realm of autism.
I had no idea what they were talking about, so I went over to Pharyngula and saw that PZ, fresh from correctly criticizing Richard Dawkins for failing to understand that you can’t complain about people reacting emotionally when you intentionally push their emotional buttons with rhetoric intended to do just that, had somehow decided that the coverage of Robin Williams’s suicide was a wonderful opportunity to strike a morally superior prose and preen about his supposed a) lack of interest in celebrities and b) deep concern for people of African descent. The response referenced above:
Celebrity culture. Fuck it. These people do not have an emotional connection to Robin Williams, the man; it’s fine to like the actor/comedian and enjoy his work, but look at this thread, and my twitter feed: people are freaking out that someone pointed out that the obsession with celebrity is getting in the way of caring about things that matter. I’m mainly feeling that I should have been more rude, because asking me to have been nicer about the dead famous guy is completely missing the point.
But it’s not PZ’s social autism that amuses me. I’ve known his AQ score indicates basic lack of empathy since 2008; my observations concerning the connection between atheism and social autism in TIA even prompted at least two scientific studies. What amuses me is PZ’s transparent hypocrisy.
I’m sorry to report that comedian Robin Williams has committed suicide, an event of great import and grief to his family. But his sacrifice has been a great boon to the the news cycle and the electoral machinery — thank God that we have a tragedy involving a wealthy white man to drag us away from the depressing news about brown people. I mean, really: young 18 year old black man gunned down for walking in the street vs. 63 year old white comedian killing himself?
That is from the first of two posts about Robin Williams at Pharyngula. The number of posts about Michael Brown’s death on Pharyngula and the subsequent black unrest in Ferguson, MO in the five days since his death? ZERO. PZ is not only empathetically obtuse, he is observably guilty of the very act he was attempting to portray himself as being above.
Of course, PZ is smart enough to know that the reason that the media doesn’t cover the deaths of young black men is because doing so would shatter their attempts to sell the myth of racial equality. If the media did what he feigns to want, he would accuse them of racism, because if every death of a young black man was covered in the same intense detail as Robin Williams’s death, there would be more nationwide demand for interning all male African-Americans between the ages of 15 and 30 than there ever was for interning Japanese-Americans.
Speaking at Wikipedia’s annual Wikimania conference in London today, Wales said: “History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.
“I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That’s history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that’s deeply immoral.”
I can’t think of any non-state organization that suppresses the truth as much as Wikipedia. The system that Wales has set up ruthlessly and relentlessly suppresses the truth under its false rubric of requiring a “reliable source”.
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Wikipedia page about me. Does that describe my views at all? Are the totality of my views really limited to little more than a feud with John Scalzi and my expulsion from SFWA? Do I have no opinions on economics, politics, philosophy, literature, and religion despite having written books on the former and the latter? It’s telling, too, to observe that if the so-called feud and the expulsion are the only significant aspects of my views, there is no mention of the connection between the former and the latter.
Now, here are my views on the various schools of economics:
The Austrian school of economics presently provides Man’s best understanding of the field of economics, but the core mechanism for its business cycle is incorrect. In place of the shift between consumer goods and capital goods, it is the limits of demand for credit that is the causal factor of the boom-bust cycle.
Those are my actual views on the subject. That is the absolute truth. Post them on Wikipedia and they’ll be suppressed within 24 hours even though most of my other “views” are directly taken from the “reliable source” that is my own writing.
UPDATE: Speaking of the so-called feud, I thought this Twitter exchange between one ClarkHat and John Scalzi was illuminating. McRapey clearly doesn’t grasp (or more likely, being a gamma male, is unable to publicly admit), that he is a successful, but mediocre SF writer, not even when his book was picked up for a television series by the distinguished network famous for Sharknado and Werewolves vs Strippers:
CLARKHAT: Would you care to actually respond to my comments that 1) your writing is mediocre 2) your rewards >> your merit
JOHN SCALZI: Sure: 1. You’re wrong, 2. You’re wrong but even if you were right so what? Hope that helps.
CH: suggests a theory I hadn’t considered: you really DON’T understand the delta between your work & great work
JS: Your problem is you have really no understanding of my psychology. Which is fine, but doesn’t make you less wrong. I don’t mind you being wrong, however, as it has no effect on what I do or how I do it. Go on being wrong!
You and I have no disagreement in you sharing your thoughts on what is great writing. Do! I think that’s a fine thing.
CH: But this is again Blue Model reframing: “your thoughts”. My pt is not about “my truth”; it is about objective artistic truth. I am not saying “**I** prefer Mieville over @scalzi”; I am saying “objective standards exist; try some Mieville”.
JS: “Objective artistic truth.” Ooooh, I have the giggles now. DO GO ON.
CH: “You think Davinci’s David is better than my paper mache puppet of Donald Trump? That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
JS: This objective art hypothesis of yours is ADORABLE. And explains many things, i.e., “What I like is OBJECTIVELY great, so there.”
That’s the amusing thing about McRapey. For all his vaunted rhetorical skills granted by virtue of BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he doesn’t grasp that he can’t assert that ClarkHat is wrong about him being a mediocre writer while simultaneously denying the concept of objective standards in art.
If all art is subjective, then Scalzi is a mediocre writer by virtue of ClarkHat subjectively declaring him to be so. And if all art is objective, then he is a mediocre writer by virtue of the comparison of his work with that of other, better writers. There is no way that Scalzi can correctly declare ClarkHat to be wrong, as he nevertheless repeatedly does.
